When Your Food Makes a Face

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

When Your Food Makes a Face

Food is way more fun when it makes faces at you. One webpage has collected photos of fruits and veggies that look a lot like people and animals, just because they grew funny. Potatoes look amazingly like sheep or teddy bears, tomatoes look like a duck and a horned devil, and squashes look like geese and ducks. Carrots, parsnips and radishes have split to grow extra branches, and end up looking like people with arms and legs. They’re all root vegetables (the underground part of the plant). Next time you shop for groceries, take a good look at the veggies: they might be looking right back at you.

Wee ones: Tomatoes are red. Try to find 3 red things in your room.

Little kids: The “bear” potato has 4 bumps for the legs and 1 more bump to make the head. How many bumps is that? Bonus: There are 5 photos of carrots (including one that looks like an astronaut), but 2 of those photos each show 2 carrots hugging. How many carrots are in these photos all together?

Big kids: If you take 28 crazy food photos of your fridge and 6 photos have potatoes in them, how many don’t have potatoes? Bonus: If it took 5 minutes to pose and photograph each of the 28 foods, how many hours and minutes of photography time did it take?

The sky’s the limit: Suppose 1 out of every 25 potatoes and 1 out of every 20 carrots looks like an animal or face. If you go shopping and buy 100 potatoes and 60 carrots, are you likely to end up with more fun potatoes or more fun carrots?

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.